Paul Dale

Doubt

5 Feb 2009

DRAMA If, as the old proverb goes, ‘doubt makes the mountain that faith can move’, then John Patrick Shanley’s powerful 2004 play, set in a Catholic school, posits a relative Kilimanjaro in the middle of the Bronx. When the headmistress Sister…

Bolt

5 Feb 2009

ANIMATION/ADVENTURE Classic pet road movies The Incredible Journey (1963) and Homeward Bound (1993) meet The Truman Show in heart-tugging Disney animation. Child actress Penny (voiced by Miley Cyrus) and dog Bolt (John Travolta) star in a hit TV…

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

5 Feb 2009

COMEDY/ROMANCE Another year, another execrable Woody Allen film. Our bankrupt Icelandic friends have a proverb for this kind of thing – ‘mediocrity is climbing molehills without sweating.’ Young Americans Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina…

The Good The Bad The Weird

5 Feb 2009

WESTERN/ACTION Gifted South Korean filmmaker Kim Ji-woon takes on Sergio Leone’s greatest western and (unbelievably) emerges victorious. It’s the 1930s in the desert wilderness of Japanese colonised Chinese Manchuria and three treasure hunters are in…

Festival express

22 Jan 2009

February used to be particularly problematic for the Scottish-based film obsessive. With the Rotterdam, Berlin and Sundance festivals running back to back from the end of January through February, it used to seem like the whole world was getting to…

Valkyrie - Assassins

22 Jan 2009

There’s nothing like an assassination to stave off boredom. From Ancient Rome to modern day America the fundamentalist agenda of the man with the deadly plan has found support in the disparate philosophical writings of Voltaire, Molière, and David…

Revolutionary Road

22 Jan 2009

DRAMA Age of Anxiety writer Richard Yates’ first and arguably finest novel gets a Titanic big screen makeover courtesy of reunited stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and director hubby Sam Mendes. It’s 1955 in suburban Connecticut; the…

DVD Round-Up

22 Jan 2009

Two great documentaries, available for the first time on DVD, get co-opted into the advertising campaigns for big cinema releases Valkyrie and Milk (reviewed on pages 42 and 43 respectively) this fortnight. Rob Epstein’s excellent Oscar winning 1984…

Urban Reflections

22 Jan 2009

FILM/PHOTOGRAPHY Five artists attempt to answer novelist Jonathan Raban’s call (from his wonderful 1974 book of ‘interdisciplinary’ urban reflections, Soft City) to create a ‘vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the continual creative play of…

The Brøken

22 Jan 2009

HORROR/THRILLER Edgar Allen Poe’s short story William Wilson meets Hitchcock’s Marnie in Cashback writer and director Sean Ellis’ second feature. When beautiful and seemingly stable radiologist Gina McVey (Lena Headey) wakes in a London hospital…

Valkyrie

22 Jan 2009

THRILLER Secret Germany and the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler get the 24 treatment in Bryan X-Men Singer’s engaging new thriller. Months before the end of World War II, aristocratic Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise…

Faintheart

22 Jan 2009

COMEDY/ROMANCE If ever there was an argument that the business of popular filmmaking should be left to the professionals Faintheart is it. The result of an initiative by MySpace, Vertigo Films and Film4 to ‘harness the collective creativity of the…

Preview 2009 - Film

8 Jan 2009

There are three years to go until the end of the world, according to Mayan prophecies and it seems filmmakers can’t stop looking back to look forward. Let’s start at the beginning of the year when the 1978 assassination of Harvey Milk, civil rights…

DVD Round-Up

8 Jan 2009

It’s January and the party is over. Months of belt-tightening and couch surfing lay ahead for those of us bankrupted by seasonal (or more international financial) excess. But let’s keep in mind Jean-Paul Sartre’s eulogy that ‘to read a poem in January…

Luca Frei

8 Jan 2009

Entrenched in a Dadaist slipstream of playful bemusement, Swiss-born, Swedish-based artist Frei is usually as mad, bad and fun as a bag of rainbow painted spiders. His contrived installations, which have graced cutting edge galleries in Paris, New York…

Will Eisner - The Best of The Spirit

8 Jan 2009

SUPERHERO With his domino mask, blue suit, red tie, blue fedora hat and gloves, Denny Colt aka The Spirit was what one newspaper in the 1940s referred to ‘the only real middle-class crimefighter’. Created in 1940 for a strip in a Sunday newspaper…

Calling all List readers

The Richard Attenborough Film Awards

5 Jan 2009

Before we look forward to 2009, we want List readers to look back to their favourite films of yesteryear, well 2008 anyway. The List has joined the prestigious Richard Attenborough Film Awards (RAFAs) to create an all new readers poll for the best Film…

The Hot 100 2008

11 Dec 2008

It’s been a helluva year. 2008 has been a time of significant global change, socially, politically and culturally, with Scotland no exception. So here, for your delectation, is The List’s pick of the 100 people, places and things that rocked our world…

Film books round-Up

11 Dec 2008

‘Tis the season to settle down with a good old-fashioned film book. Having a stack of cinema related tomes on your bedside table is essential for any aspiring cineaste at this time of year. So after many hours of sifting through recent releases this is…

To Get to Heaven You Have to Die (Bihisht Faqat Baroi Murdagon)

11 Dec 2008

(15) 95min Tajikistani writer/director Jamshed Usmonov’s macho but engaging, quirky and darkly humourous tale of impotence and mafia initiation is his first since 2002’s equally measured and memorable Angel on the Right. Set, like that film, in and…

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S Thompson

11 Dec 2008

(15) 119min Alex Gibney’s informative new documentary about the photojournalist and socio-political chronicler’s turbulent life and work obviously involved a lot of extra-curricular activity. Mapping Thompson’s trajectory from Twain and…

Close Up

27 Nov 2008

PHOTOGRAPHY/FILM ‘Why has not man a microscopic eye? For the plain reason man is not a fly.’ The early 18th century poet Alexander Pope’s wrote that, perhaps in a moment of peevishness. Between Pope’s witticism and writer and critic William Hazlitt’s…

Summer

27 Nov 2008

DRAMA There is no Shakespearean ‘eternal summer’ for Shaun (Robert Carlyle) and Daz (Steve Evets). Shaun looks after wheelchair bound Daz in an impoverished ex-mining community in Derbyshire. Daz is mouthy, bitter and demanding while Shaun is silent…

Lakeview Terrace

27 Nov 2008

THRILLER (15) 110min What could be safer than living next door to a cop? Well just about anything if that cop happens to be played by one of America’s leading black actors. Smug young marrieds Chris (Patrick Wilson) and Lisa (Kerry Washington) move…

Flawless

27 Nov 2008

HEIST/THRILLER Sometimes diamonds are not a girl’s best friend. It’s London in 1960 and Laura Quinn (Demi Moore) is beginning to realise that her hard won managerial post for the South African owned London Diamond Company may not be as secure as she…

Quiet Chaos

27 Nov 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE Nanni Moretti’s 2001 film The Son’s Room explored a middle-class Italian family’s attempt to cope with the unexpected death of a teenage son. Quiet Chaos, which stars and is co-written by Moretti, but is directed by Antonello Grimaldi…

Porn in the movies

13 Nov 2008

Platonic friends Zack and Miri one day decide that in the current economic climate the only way to diminish their respective personal debts is to make a pornographic film together, but the world of amateur porno filmmaking is not as easy as it seems. So…

Big time - Metro Ecosse film competition

13 Nov 2008

It’s been too long, but you know how it is – one thing leads to another and then it’s Christmas time again. Anyway, the time has come to check up on the progress of the second film competition. To recap – back in December 2006, The List launched Metro’s…

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

13 Nov 2008

(18) 149min Based on the non-fiction book by Der Spiegel editor and journalist Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a compelling and engrossing attempt to explain the trajectory and political position of arguably the most incoherent post-war…

Choke

13 Nov 2008

(18) 92min Unrepentant sex addict Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) has always believed that life is about making other people do stuff for you. By day he does as little work as he can at a historical theme park and by night he cons money in restaurants…

Body of Lies

13 Nov 2008

(15) 128min As with 2001’s Black Hawk Down, South Shields’ most famous filmmaker Ridley Scott again attempts to pull a callous zeitgeist from international news headlines, with unconvincing results. CIA operative Roger Ferris (Leonardo Di Caprio…

Jack Kilborn - Afraid

13 Nov 2008

Starting with a plane crash and ending with a coyote-on-human chow down, Afraid is a rattling good read for those who have the stomach for it. When a mutant military force turns up unannounced at the friendly law-abiding town of Safe Haven (population…

Richard Forster

13 Nov 2008

DRAWINGS Recalling poet laureate John Masefield’s most famous poem, Sea Fever (‘I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide / Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied’), Untitled (Seascapes), Forster’s first solo…

Boris Artzybasheff - As I See

13 Nov 2008

On a trajectory from the surreal to the satirical Russian-born New Yorker lies somewhere between Man Ray and Gerald Scarfe. First published in 1954, As I See is a collection of striking illustrations reflecting, among other things, the burgeoning…

Todd Rundgren interview: Full transcript

6 Nov 2008

What follows is a transcript of an interview I did with the great American musician and record producer Todd Rundgren on Tuesday 21 October. He spoke to me down the line from his Hawaii home, it was 8.30pm UK time and 12.30pm Pacific Mean Time when we…

Hunger

Protest picture

30 Oct 2008

'Were you out last night my friend?' 'Is it that obvious?' I say pulling down a wrinkled lower eyelid to expose an eye as bloodshot as those of the two men opposite me. They are hot young actor Michael Fassbender - all fair brown hair, blue eyes, slight…

Hunger

(15) 95min

30 Oct 2008

In 1981, IRA member Bobby Sands allowed his body to become the ultimate instrument of protest when he led the Maze prison hunger strike in order to win political status for imprisoned members of the IRA. Directed by Turner Prize winning artist Steve…

DVD Round-up

30 Oct 2008

The much threatened, barely still breathing DVD industry has had little to celebrate in the last few years. The current modus operandi seems to be: ‘let’s release as much old, new and rubbish stuff as we can before the bubble bursts and new technology…

Of Time and the City

30 Oct 2008

The great but religiously underfunded British filmmaker Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The House of Mirth) returns to his Liverpool home with this fascinating subjective documentary. Made and released to coincide…

Easy Virtue

30 Oct 2008

England, the 1920s. Dashing young socialite John Whittaker (Ben Barnes) returns to his ancestral pile with his spunky new American wife Larita (Jessica Biel). A hotbed of dysfunction, xenophobia and bankruptcy the family home contains his highly-strung…

Will Eisner - Textbooks

30 Oct 2008

Undoubtedly what editor Denis Kitchen calls the 'primary treatise on the theory and mechanics of modern comics', Eisner's influential textbook Comics and Sequential Art and its two companion guides get a makeover for the digital age. Honed from lectures…

Babylon

30 Oct 2008

The long overdue DVD release of Franco Rosso’s seminal 1980 tale of working class black youths and their music in South London really is something to celebrate. A kind of reggae counterpart to Quadrophenia, Rosso’s naturalistic film details the…

Burn After Reading

16 Oct 2008

THRILLER/COMEDY Modern idiocy and bleak humour are the order of the day in the Coen’s latest – a reworking (conscious or otherwise) of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of An Author. Foul-mouthed CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich…

Ghost Town

16 Oct 2008

COMEDY/ROMANCE Middle-aged ‘smock-wearing tooth jockey’ (dentist) Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais) is a hateful runt of a man. He lives a life as contained as it is misanthropic. After going into hospital for an endoscopy, Bertram starts to see dead…

The Rocker

16 Oct 2008

COMEDY Twenty years on from being dumped by big haired ‘soft-cock rock’ 80s legends Vesuvius, drummer Fish (Rainn Wilson) still burns with the indignation of the holy. While crashing at his sister’s house he agrees to be the drummer for his nephew’s…

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

2 Oct 2008

Screenwriter, producer and director Bob Weide has spent his two score and ten odd years genuflecting at the altar of American comedy. A foremost knowledge on the life and work of the Marx Brothers (along with our own Simon Louvish) and, arguably, the…

Babylon

2 Oct 2008

DRAMA/CRIME The long overdue DVD release of Franco Rosso’s seminal 1980 tale of working class black youths and their music in South London really is something to celebrate. A kind of reggae counterpart to Quadrophenia, Rosso’s naturalistic film…

LGBT DVD Round-Up

18 Sep 2008

International interest in the sciences may have been piqued by the recent, less-exciting-than-it sounds Big Bang experiment but let’s face it – the most important question is: ‘If time and space are curved, where do all of the straight people come…

Salo

18 Sep 2008

DVD (18) 112min (BFI DVD retail) Pier Paolo Pasolini’s loose 1975 adaptation of the Marquis De Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom gets an excellent two disc DVD (and Blu-ray) makeover with a ton of fantastic extras. Pasolini transposed De Sade’s tale…

Taken

18 Sep 2008

THRILLER/ACTION (15) 93min *** When it comes to his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), retired US secret agent operative Bryan (Liam Neeson) is feeling pretty redundant. Her new stepfather (Xander Berkeley) is wealthy enough to give her everything she…